You have to feel sorry for John Tamihere, with his back to the wall and fighting for his life. Or at least for his multi-million-dollar lifestyle and the millions he controls through the Waipareira Trust and other entities.
And so he does what any of us would do: he plays every card he has in his hand as he pushes back against the Pākehā establishment that is so unfairly trying to ferret out the truth.
Unfortunately for Tamihere, as president of Te Pāti Māori he sits at the very apex of the grievance industry pyramid and consequently his cards are all race cards – so those are the ones he’s playing.
At his press conference, Tamihere fronted the media and asserted that any data used were ethically sourced and belonged to his organisation.
On that basis I think we can safely ignore the Statistics NZ report conclusion “it was more likely than not” that completed census forms were left unsealed, stored at the marae and then photocopied, and that the information from them was harvested into a database for other purposes.
Score one for JT. He says that was ethical and who are we to argue?
He also said authorities are “trying to turn Māori into an organised crime group”. But Te Pāti Māori looks nothing like Black Power or the Mongrel Mob, so that can’t be right. They don’t even have patches, which further proves the point.
Score two for JT. Elites? Forming organised crime groups? To rip off the plebs? Never happened before in the history of the world as far as I can recall…
Moving on, JT claimed it wasn’t a conflict of interest if a marae hosted a polling booth, because booths are also hosted in churches, in rural areas where Federated Farmers run them and in “rich guys’ areas”, where employers, business men and unions control them.
Classic obfuscation JT, well played. Let’s just ignore that it’s not the hosting of polling booths in any marae that is objected to, just the one at Manurewa Marae, the one where these ‘alleged’ irregularities occurred.
And you’re certainly right that churchgoers, people in rural areas (who may or may not know farmers), anyone associated with “rich guys”, and especially not people in unions, shouldn’t really have access to polling booths because they’re not likely to vote for TPM.
And those ‘polling booth management groups’ haven’t worked out how to get their hands on confidential personal data, so more fool them: they don’t really deserve to have a booth to run, anyway.
Score three for JT, successfully shifted focus onto the obvious electoral corruption surrounding churchgoers, farmers, employers, unions and “rich guys” of every stripe.
Finally Te Pāti Māori claimed “that Māori participation in electoral politics alongside community mahi empowering whānau Māori should not be regarded as giving rise to any appearance of a conflict of interest”.
Which of course is also true. Information about Māori, whether from census documents or Covid-19 vaccination data, if used in electoral politics can’t be a conflict of interest because, by definition, all Māori should support Te Pāti Māori (it’s in the name, stupid) and, in consequence, their information must rightly belong to Te Pāti Māori.
So score one, two, three and four for JT and Te Pāti Māori in this debate.
The sooner the Pākehā truth police (whom we trust will, like the wheels of God, grind exceedingly small, because they’re certainly grinding exceedingly slow in this investigation) get off JT’s back, the sooner he and his seven million dollar Waipareira management team can get back to providing ‘free services and support for whānau of all ages in West Auckland’.
Surely that’s more important than getting side-tracked by a few thousand photocopied census forms and Māori roll-switch rewards of a measly $100-$200 in food vouchers. You Pākehā just don’t understand how we do things in Māoridom.
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